There’s so much traffic up and down your Boulevard
Strolling down the Track, another day in the Life

Your Nation has been raided
Is there a there there?

About the Author:

LeConté Dill was born and raised in South Central Los Angeles and currently lives in Brooklyn. She earned degrees from Spelman College, UCLA, and the University of California, Berkeley. She has participated in the VONA/Voices Writing Workshops, as well as the Cave Canem workshops. LeConté’s work has been featured in the Berkeley Poetry Review, Cal Literature and Arts Magazine, The Feminist Wire, Los Angeles Magazine, and The Wide Shore. She coauthored, coedited, and copublished a poetry anthology with a group of teens from Oakland, California, entitled Y U Gotta Call It Ghetto? (2011). Currently, LeConté is an assistant professor at the SUNY Downstate School of Public Health, in Brooklyn.

It’s easiest to start from the impulse to problematize the position of the flâneur. The ugly word privilege hovers around it, and we turn to questions that we know the answer to, “Who, exactly, is allowed to wander, like so?”

That Diana and the Amazons speak ‘hundreds’ of languages is believable, given their situation and seeming enlightenment; that English becomes their go-to choice for daily chats off the Greek coast, less so.

On the ancient river, seagull rock crests out of the waters. An outcrop within its sight is thorned by a few young silhouettes, taking turns plunging into the river some feet below. Riverboats and water taxis, white river cruise-ships weave short and cyclical tours between the two shores.